Introducing GIFV

GIFs are no longer about .GIFs–the culture of the GIF now trumps the file format. With Project GIFV, Imgur is reimagining the looping GIF video with all the richness it deserves as a key piece of Internet culture.

The above GIF started at a whopping 50MB. After conversion, the final file is 3.4MB and loads at warp speed. Pretty sweet, right?

The cornerstone of Project GIFV is a platform-wide upgrade to automatically convert uploaded GIF files on the fly into the WebM or MP4 video formats, depending on browser support. The converted videos are significantly smaller than their equivalent GIFs, which allows them to load at lightning-fast speeds with better quality. By lowering bandwidth consumption, the change also optimizes Imgur for users on mobile. Rejoice!

Beyond performance increases, the core experience will not change: Project GIFV implements video in a way that looks and behaves exactly like a GIF. Project GIFV also introduces three major upgrades to the GIF experience on Imgur:

Massively Increased Upload Limits: With the efficiencies introduced by WebM and MP4, Imgur is increasing its traditional GIF upload limit of 5MB by an order of magnitude to 50MB. This opens the door to massive improvements in quality. (Note: Original files over 20MB will not be available after upload)

Optimized for Social Channels: Uploads to Imgur will now fully animate on channels like Twitter and Facebook, allowing for the sharing of the full GIF experience throughout the social web.

The .GIFV Extension: With all these improvements, Imgur will now denote converted videos with a “.gifv” extension. The intention is to signal to users throughout the Internet that these links will feature a GIF experience that incorporates all the current and future enhancements made through Project GIFV. Imgur plans to submit an accompanying specification to relevant standards organizations before the end of the year.

We hope these changes deliver an improved GIF experience on Imgur with more fun and less frustration, optimizing it for all of the changes that have happened on the Internet since the format was first introduced in 1987.

Is the imgur development related to GFY? ( http://gfycat.com/about ) Is there plans to make this a standard? I really adore their implementation and I believe imgur should work in conjunction with them to develop a strong standard.

In the end, it would be nice to see the displayed GIFV/GFY behave in the exact same way as current GIFs: drap/drop to save a file (like the current .GIFs now), support for every platform (mobile will be happy about this one…), integration in other websites, etc.

Thanks and good luck! The road ahead looks bright and populated with GIFs of cats.

Will Imgur still store and provide for download the original uploaded GIF so the animations can be shared and edited losslessly? GIFs being lossless, editable and universally supported are a pretty big part of what spawned this “culture of the GIF”.

I think Imgur’s definition of Mobile support and mine vary greatly. If I can’t view it in my native browser, it is not supported. End of story. Two days ago, spent quite a while browsing Imgur. Yesterday and today, 5 minutes before giving up. If you detect iOS, load gifs. Or make it an option in user settings. As it stands, theres no point in visiting this site any more.

This is definitely a huge improvement to animations in social media. However, wouldn’t it make sense to allow users to upload mp4s? (within specified constraints of course) Is this feature planned? Making mp4s may be a tad easier than making gifs not to mention upload times would be dramatically decreased as well, thanks to smaller file sizes.

Just wanted to say I think it’s great that imgur is working towards making improvements like this. However, and not sure this is everyone’s experience but I’m having some problems with this feature. I tried a 30MB .gif this morning and it wouldn’t convert. Then tried a 11MB file and it did convert.

Just as a suggestion …why not allow a direct .mp4 upload …or better yet html5?

Ok, I will just be the jerk and bring up the elephant in the room: how is this any different from normal mp4 (excluding the file extension)? On iOS, viewing these files will still require the “gifv” to go full-screen, which defeats the purpose.

This is awful news unless apps that deal with videos change immensely. Anyone who saves GIFs will now be getting video files, which are treated very differently on mobile OS’s. On Android, this means no browsing saved “Gifs” without pausing music, it means no swiping between :GIFs” and it means no looping of “GIFs” (Just checked on my phone with zvATqgs). Not to mention the fact that sharing video files is supported by fewer platforms than GIFs.

Super excited at first. Not so much after a try.
Files under 10mb won’t be converted (I think)
Won’t work pretty much anywhere else. Where is my embedd code?!
It would be great to implement support for wordpress, blogger tumblr, bbcode etc. Otherwise I don’t see why I should move out from gfycat.
If you have to press and go fullscreen in your mobile device, this is just NOT a gif alternative.